A study by two European-based nonprofits has found that Microsoft's artificial intelligence (AI) Bing chatbot, now rebranded as Copilot, produces misleading results on election information and misquotes its sources.
He study was published by AI Forensics and AlgorithmWatch on December 15 and found that Bing's AI chatbot gave incorrect answers 30% of the time to basic questions about political elections in Germany and Switzerland. Inaccurate answers were given about candidate information, polls, scandals and voting.
It also produced inaccurate answers to questions about the 2024 US presidential election.
The Bing AI chatbot was used in the study because it was one of the first AI chatbots to include fonts in its responses, and the study said the inaccuracies are not limited to Bing. They reportedly ran preliminary tests on ChatGPT-4 and also found discrepancies.
The nonprofits clarified that false information has not influenced the outcome of the election, although it could contribute to public confusion and misinformation.
"As generative AI becomes more widespread, this could affect one of the cornerstones of democracy: access to reliable and transparent public information."
Additionally, the study found that safeguards built into the AI โโchatbot were "unevenly" distributed and caused it to provide evasive responses 40% of the time.
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According to a Wall Street Journal report On the topic, Microsoft responded to the findings and said it plans to fix the issues before the 2024 US presidential election. A Microsoft spokesperson encouraged users to always check the accuracy of information obtained from AI chatbots.
In early October of this year, US senators proposed a bill that would rebuke creators of unauthorized AI replicas of real humans, living or dead.
In November, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, introduced a mandate that banned the use of generative AI ad creation tools for political advertisers as a precautionary measure for the upcoming elections.
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